Category Archives: Innovation Management

In the past, I have contributed on topics like innovation management and open innovation. I have always been a big fan of innovation. But then recently I stumbled upon the term “fabrication”. I was talking to this friend of mine who works in the R&D department of an IT company. We were debating about product lines and how to expand or diversify them. As the debate heated up, he very passionately announced, “I would rather innovate than fabricate!”

A few months back a colleague handed me a report published by Juniper Research on mobile augmented reality (AR). The report predicted mobile based AR apps to witness 1.4 billion downloads by 2015 – a business worth $1.5 billion approximately.

I dropped my jaw and gawked at Juniper’s report. My reaction had nothing to do with the figures contained in there. I have never doubted AR’s potential all this while. In fact, somehow I have always known that one day AR was going to be big – probably too big to handle. Rather it was a surreal feeling for me. I was like ‘yay I was right about AR.’

While we have been spending time dealing with innovation and innovation management, a new trend has snuck up on us called ‘open innovation’. The term was first coined by author Henry Chesbrough in his path-breaking book Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology.

The book brought to attention the growing but subtle trend of companies drifting away from closed R&D and adopting a more open innovation process. Enterprises have always worked hand-in-glove with external partners like universities to match steps with the latest and greatest in research. But open innovation brings in a whole another dimension.

‘What’s the new thing’ – how many times do we hear this? On a daily basis, right? We are a generation that is constantly craving for something new in the markets. We change our preferences overnight and expect technologies to emerge out of nowhere to meet them. And have we been disappointed till date? Absolutely not! It seems like before we even conjure up what we want, we have it catered to us, courtesy constantly innovating enterprises.

Today enterprises are buzzing and pulsating with incessant innovations. The brutal competition requires these enterprises to be on their toes and keep innovating new products, technologies and concepts to dazzle the markets.